Parametric polymorphism in Java: an approach to translation based on reflective features

  • Authors:

  • Mirko Viroli;Antonio Natali

  • Affiliations:

  • DEIS University of Bologna, via Rasi e Spinelli 176, 47023 Cesena (FC), Italy;DEIS University of Bologna, via Risorgimento 2, 40136 Bologna, Italy

  • Venue:
  • OOPSLA '00 Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

The introduction of parametric polymorphism in Java with translation approaches has been shown to be of considerable interest, allowing the definition of extensions of Java on top of the existing Virtual Machines. Homogeneous translations furthermore, seem to be more useful than heterogeneous, avoiding the continuous increase of library code with redundant information. At this time however, homogeneous approaches aren't as flexible as heterogeneous, with extensions failing to integrate well with base language typing. In this paper, using some of the features of the Core Reflection of Java, we introduce a homogeneous translation in which run-time information about instantiation of type-parameters is carried, allowing full integration of parame-terized types with Java typing. Performance overhead is greatly decreased using a brand new translation technique based on the deferring of the management of type information at load-time. The same power and flexibility of previous heterogeneous approaches is obtained while maintaining homogeneous translation advantages.